The analog front-end of a receiver usually needs a variable gain amplifier (also known as an automatic gain control). However, some automatic gain control designs may suffer from parasitic peaking at lower gain codes. For example, the peaking may occur due to the parasitic capacitance at the tail node which, together with bigger resistor values for the degeneration resistor, RS, may cause this undesired parasitic peaking. In addition to the parasitic peaking, the automatic gain control's gain settings are discrete that depend on the number of programmable branches used to tune the degeneration resistor, RS. This, in turn, may cause several design trade-offs. For example, using more branches to create finer gain-steps, will lead to more parasitics and more un-desired peaking. The degeneration resistor, RS also causes the gain to vary significantly over resistor corners as the load resistor, RL, is calibrated to keep a constant bandwidth while RS is not calibrated to minimize the parasitic capacitance. Due to the parasitic peaking at lower gain codes, additional load capacitors needed to be provided to reduce the parasitic peaking and bandwidth, but this approach wastes silicon area.